1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mobile terminal provided with a television broadcast receiving function.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, as regards mobile terminals such as cellular phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), terminals with reception functions of television broadcasting such as one-segment terrestrial digital broadcasting (hereinafter referred to as one-segment broadcasting) have become widely used. Using these types of mobile terminals allow users to view television broadcasts anytime and anywhere in a broadcasting service area and bring the users convenience.
By the way, recently, it has been proposed to notify program information of a television broadcast being viewed to other users, so as to allow a plurality of users to view the same television broadcast and so share content. For instance, a technique is proposed, in which area channel information is generated and stored by associating identification (ID) of a base station with a frequency of a television broadcast signal which can be received when the mobile terminals belong to the base station, and the area-channel information is transmitted to other terminals by means of e-mails via a mobile communication network (e.g., Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 2005-151093).
However, in such mobile terminals proposed conventionally, for transmitting the area-channel information to other terminals, it is needed for the users to stop once display operations of the television broadcast being viewed to start mailers for transmitting e-mails, and to generate and transmit e-mails as usual. Therefore, the users have to interrupt the viewing of the television broadcast during generation and transmission of the e-mails, or have to decrease in size of viewing screens then the users may miss desired scenes of the television broadcast or may fail to acquire important information sometimes during interruption or decreasing. Thus, this problem has been forced to take prompt measures.